The Decade That Changed Our Lives!

The end of the year brings a time of reflection and resolution. What’s happened over the past 12 months, and what will be different in the next 12. But this year is a little bit special. The New Year will end in a zero, an almost fresher, cleaner page than usual. It got us thinking about how much our lives have changed in this last decade.

Back in 2009, we lived in a three bedroom house with a gym in the garage and a hot tub in the garden, we had a car each and a panel van motorhome which got used for the odd two week trip. We’d been renting out the bungalow we had previously lived in to cover the mortgage on it, after we failed to sell it three years earlier before the market plummeted just as we moved into the three-bed house. That hadn’t really bothered us though as we were both had fairly well paid jobs, having been promoted over the past few years into roles neither of us really wanted or enjoyed.

We had also just finished our first year of overpaying on our main mortgage. After watching a TV show in 2008 called ‘Pay Your Mortgage Off In Two Years’, we’d been inspired to try and pay £20k off our mortgage in a year. We stopped buying ‘stuff’, sticking only to essentials and reduced our outgoings in simple ways like taking sandwiches to work and not having take-aways so often. We smashed our target, managing to pay £26k off the mortgage. This left us owing just over £66k. With a few more years similar effort we could be rid of it entirely. 

Spreadsheets were drawn up to track our progress paying off the mortgage. While we didn’t monitor every penny we spent, we did have another spreadsheet tracking our income and outgoings so we could see what we had left each month – which all then got transferred to the mortgage account. Watching the total reduce each month got a bit addictive. As the number got lower, we started looking around at what we owned that we could sell to speed up the process. By the end of 2010 the hot tub and gym were gone and we’d chonked off a massive £44k, leaving us with just over £22k left to pay off.

As 2011 dawned, with it came the realisation that with one final push our mortgage would be gone by the end of the year. What a push it was, having already discussed taking a year out to travel, we started to sell pretty much everything else we owned (or at least, so we thought). Knowing he wasn’t the right van for us for a long-term trip, ‘Harvey the RV’ was sold and by May the mortgage was gone. I can’t begin to describe the feeling of freedom that came with that. We set about planning our ‘trip of a lifetime’ – a year in a motorhome touring Europe. We also started a little blog to keep friends and family up to date – OurTour.co.uk was born. 

2011 was a strange year, the big push to get the mortgage paid off brought elation, but we may have pushed ourselves just a bit too far. Our travel plans were geared up around setting off in June 2012, then one sunny afternoon those plans changed. I remember sitting in our garden as Jay broke down in tears. He’d changed jobs in May and hated the new role, he was slipping into depression. Right there and then, the freedom of having paid off the mortgage meant we could do something about it. The following week we both handed in our notice.

Jay only had to wait a month to leave, so while I served out the rest of my notice he finished getting our house ready to rent out. Once we’d bought Dave the Hymer B544, Jay set to work preparing him for our adventure, adding solar panels and painting the wheels!

All this time we were saving money for our trip, which was even easier to do without a mortgage to pay each month. We had roughly calculated how much our trip would cost, and as we set off our bank balance showed we had £28,050.59 to spend on our year-long adventure. Knowing that once that pot of money was gone we’d have to return home, a new spreadsheet was created to track every penny we spent. Then in October 2011, after many tearful farewells we handed the house keys to our letting agent and set off (although it felt a lot more frantic that that if I remember correctly).

The next year saw us visit 16 different countries including a month touring Morocco which we’d not planned to do. We initially tried to spend as little as possible, but then had the realisation that we were on our ‘trip of a lifetime’ so we needed to start spending money doing things, going to places and eating out. We discovered ‘free camping’ and after a first sleepless night, convinced we would be killed in our beds, I got used to it and this helped up not only keep our budget down, but also to sleep in some amazing places. While on the road we blogged every day, partially to ease the guilt of not being at work, but also because it was a great way to diarise our trip, we even wrote and self-published a couple of books. Towards the end of the year we totted up how much we had spent and decided we had enough left to squeeze out another year – so we nipped home for an MOT, said hello to friends and family and within two weeks we set off again.

Our next trip, from October 2012 to September 2013, took us to Eastern Europe and saw us visiting 14 different countries including Tunisia and Ukraine. As we sat on a beach in Greece we knew it was the turnaround point. From there on, we’d be heading north towards home. We’d loved our travels, but our pot of money was running out and something that has to happen, for whatever reason, always seems even harder to take. Crazily we still had a few months of our trip left, but the weight of returning to ‘normality’ hung over us. 29,773 miles and 708 days after we left home, we crossed the channel back to the UK. 

We tried to hold it in, but as we drove off the ferry into Dover tears rolled down our cheeks. Before 2013 was finished we’d drawn up a plan to get ourselves into a position where we could travel whenever we wanted, while keeping a base back in the UK. It was back to the rat race for both of us, but this time with a purpose. More spreadsheets, more detailed plans drawn out on huge bits of paper, sums done and we set about financially educating ourselves. Our goal was to reach the magic number we needed to become financially free by the time we were 50 years old (in 2022).

Remember me saying we’d thought we’d sold most of our stuff? Well when we returned from our two year trip and gathered up all the belongings we’d stashed in storage, friends and family attics and garages, as well as the attic of the house we rented out, we found we had pretty much a garage full of things we didn’t need! We had got so used to living with just the things in our van – one chopping board, two sharp knives, we couldn’t understand why we had 7 chopping boards and about 30 knives in our previous life! A lot more eBay, and several trips to the charity shop later and we’d gone through our second de-cluttering exercise of the decade. 

Our tenants wanted to stay in our house, so we rented somewhere smaller while we found a UK base. That happened in May 2014 when we were drawn to a disused butchers shop in the nearby town of Kimberley. The butchers didn’t have anywhere to store Dave, and knowing he wouldn’t get used by us for a few years, we had to say a tearful farewell to our home on wheels. We moved into the house behind the shop and spent the rest of the year working at our day jobs, renovating the shop and house behind it and also setting up our own small company helping folks save money on their household bills. We still tracked every penny we spent, it was now a habit, and we were living off just my salary, so everything Jay earned as a contractor as well as the rental money from our 3 bed house house, the bungalow and now the shop went into savings.

All this time we were also still financially educating ourselves with books and blogs. As our money built up in savings, we began to invest it so it started to earn us more money. Some of it went into solar panels on the roof, some went into Premium Bonds, but most of it went into the stock market. This was very scary to start with, but we took it slowly not trying to time the market, but simply buying when we had enough saved up. 

By the end of 2014 all work and no play took its toll and I found myself in tears for no reason. I was given some time off work, but it didn’t really help, there was still a big black cloud hanging over me. I was so fortunate that Jay knew what I was going through and was able to support me way better than I was able to support him a few years earlier. 

In early 2015 after another look at our investments we reduced the magic number we needed to be financially free. Instead of aiming for £25k a year passive income we decided to make it £20k and we’d do some sort of work to fill the gap if we wanted to splash out. We set ourselves an annual budget of £15k to spend on our day to day living and with these figures, Jay convinced me to quit work for the sake of my health. Jay would continue to work as a contractor, and I would finish renovating our house as well as supervising the conversion of an outbuilding into The Cooler.  

A final declutter, which was very hard as we were having to let go of sentimental things, before we moved into The Cooler in May. In July we bought Zagan, a newer Hymer B544 named after the town in Poland that was the scene for The Great Escape and found him a storage place nearby. I finished off the work on the house and in August 2015 tenants moved in. That was when we reached tipping point – we now had enough money coming in from our investments to cover our living costs. We no longer had to work, we were financially free aged 43. 

Jay stopped contracting at the end of September and that was it, we were ‘retired’. Although it took a few years before we could bring ourselves to use that word. In October almost four years to the day we set off on our first trip, we hit the road again and in the following couple of years we’ve travelled all over Europe, from Nordkapp at the top of Norway back to the edge of the Sahara in Morocco. The difference being because we now have a base in the UK we can nip home whenever we want, so instead of being on the road all the time, our trips vary in length. 

Part of my treatment from the NHS for my anxiety was with a telephone councillor, she suggested, along with other things, I do some exercise. I started swimming as I used to love that as a child, but once I knew we’d soon be back on the road I got on the treadmill at the gym to learn to run. My first goal was to be able to do 15 minutes on the treadmill without stopping (or dying). Once I could do that I moved to running outside, building up to a 5k, then a 10k – in January 2017 I ran my first ever half marathon in Marrakesh, Morocco.  Jay also took running up again, after a break of around 20 years.

From that point on, running has shaped our travels, finding races to run and amazing places to train. In July 2018 Jay ran the Zermatt half marathon, returning a year later so I could run the half marathon while he tackled the Ultra Marathon, both times raising money for The British Lung Foundation. We’re also members of a local running club back home, so we aim to be back in the UK in the summer to join in the various league races, and social events. 

We no longer blog every day, but we have written a few more books sharing what we’ve learned about various aspects of motorhome life, including a free eBook which gives more details into our journey to financial freedom. In June 2018 we had to say goodbye to our furry travel companion Charlie, who had been on all our adventures with us from the very start, it broke our hearts, but also gave us bittersweet opportunities to travel further afield if we want to. We’re now in our fifth year of financial freedom, we still track every penny we spend, and despite our best efforts, we still live on less than our annual budget! 

In the space of a decade we’ve changed. Looking back, we were happy with our lives, but did think there must be more to life. We were stuck in the rat race, drifting through life with no goals or plans but that didn’t bother us. Neither did our expanding waistlines and ever increasing pile of stuff. These days we are a couple of early retirees who are much fitter and healthier (although this is written after several days on the Quality Street – well it is Christmas!). We still struggle with planning our futures, so we set smaller short-terms goals. Next year I plan to run 4 half marathons, Jay has a 50 mile run booked for May with a plan to maybe build up to 100 miler by the end of 2020. We love our lives and the happy mix of being at home and away – making the most of winter sunshine.   

We have no idea what the next decade will bring, or if our crazy financial freedom experiment will continue to work. But we’re looking forward to finding out.

Ju x